The new Believer is out...
...and Benjamin Strong has something to say about The Pisstown Chaos.
[A]s usual, it is Ohle’s topsy-turvy mise-en-scène that’s the real main character. Like his precursor Beckett, Ohle knows just how funny, and also how frightening, a world without memory is (“Stars? Moon? I don’t know. I never looked up much”). Each of the novel’s twelve chapters opens with excerpts from the City Moon newspaper, and Ohle’s exquisitely rendered journalese is awesome in its deadpan illogic: “Moldenke, the touring stinker, has filed a deed to purchase certain properties in the afterworld. Local legals say the properties do not exist. Moldenke says they do, at the edge of the city, and that he has seen them as recently as two nights ago.”
There's also Domenick Ammirati in Bookforum—
Unlike the writer to whom he is most often linked, William S. Burroughs, Ohle eschews radical prose play; the characterization of his writing as experimental derives from his grim absurdity, the flatness of his characters and tone, and his rejection of traditional novelistic arcs. His style is approachable and precise; he writes with dry humor in detailing the bizarre: impregnation by suppository, a Russian giant receiving a leech treatment, a job deliberately misfolding parachutes.
Part epistolary satire, part Fénéon's Novels in Three Lines (the narrative, such as it is, alternates with cryptic and alarming Pisstown news bulletins), Ohle's book pulses with the cool logic of the insane—the kind of deadpan surrealism that Ben Marcus once memorably pegged as "apathy noir." The familiar battles the strange, and the duel ends in a delirious tie.
Finally, to give you a sense of the diversity of reviewing styles a book like this requires, the Brooklyn Rail:
There’s chaos in Pisstown tonight. Stinkers are roaming the streets—wretched souls who are not quite dead yet, but who are, without doubt, dying, slowly and inexorably, infested with parasites so potent and swarming that at times whole colonies can be seen roiling under the surface of the victim’s skin, devouring the host over the course of years, even decades, bursting out finally through the victim’s rotted abdomen in a flushing spray of “cadaverine” (no etymology dictionary necessary). Living among these putrid stinkers are the good, parasitically uninfected citizens of Pisstown, desperate to avoid all physical contact with the infected ones, with fear of the illness being so great. It’s an uneasy situation for everyone involved.